The boy: flap-eared, slack-jawed, good at acting stupid even though he’s not. His father’s intellect—the physicist's penchant for obscurity—gets him decent grades, which only confirms for him how bad his high school is. Slavic eyebrows, raised behind glasses he needs for reading cereal boxes at breakfast, music magazines before bed. Sometimes he overhears his parents worrying about him—too moody, they agree, too detached—their words hushed and urgent like he’s a drug addict, or a mental patient, or both.

His parents: warm and well-meaning, but utterly unaware of what matters in his life. Secretly he wishes to please them, though he suspects the only way to ever please his father will be to discover a new sub-atomic particle with a name like “Sparky” or “Moose,” a name better suited for baseball players than neutrinos, a name that could be submitted to a Nobel Prize committee. So he concentrates on “moody”, shaving his silky blond hair down to fuzz, wearing death metal T-shirts and torn, oversized fatigue pants, and playing possum about his comings and goings.

“Where were you last night?” his mother asks, and he looks at her innocently with his stubbled chin, mute in contemplation. Have they ever felt what he feels? Have they ever sensed that he’s an outcast, a reject, the scion of rich kids who’ve already loaded up their shopping carts while he works the checkout line? Except for the girl—the one person who keeps him from being alone in the world. The one person beside his mother he has ever loved, and who, he understands with a mixture of ruefulness and regret, does not love him back.

The girl: dark layers of hair, constantly shifting, constantly coming undone. Hands darting behind her head, releasing the torrent fully, then sweeping it into a ponytail or tucking it over the back of a plastic visor. Her hair is what she thinks about most of the time. Not how it looks, but simply, what to do with it. She supposes she could chop it off, get a crewcut like her cousin did for ROTC, but everyone tells her how beautiful her hair is, how it’s her trademark. She likes the weight piled on top of her head, the familiar sensation of it flowing with her when she runs.

She runs track in the spring, cross-country in the fall. An athlete’s body—long and lean, thighs thick with muscle. Her mother was a track star, as were her two older sisters. They’ve all mentioned the NCAAs, and scholarship money that could pay for a “good” college. She doesn’t care about track, though. She doesn’t care about anything except the boy, maybe. But she can’t tell him that.

Other boys notice her. She can tell when she walks down the hall or eats lunch outside. She hears whispers, or catches their eyes on her a little too long, their bodies passing too close. And not just boys; men. Weekends she checks IDs at a health club and the weightlifters gather around her, making small talk. “How old are you?” they eventually ask, showing off their tattooed biceps. “What are you doing tonight?”

She chats with them, polite, even engaging sometimes, but never for long. She knows how to be aloof, how to say “go away” without saying it. Her mother taught her this; it’s what her mother did to make her father go away. Six years this March—she keeps a secret calendar under her bed, marking off the months. He pays for things though, like a trip last year to the Paris. And he shows up once in a while, pretending he’s happy with his flight bag and business suit, that nothing’s changed between them.

“You’re so grown up,” her father says, stroking her hair, looking fondly into the depths of her brown eyes. And she wonders: Do you know who I am? How can you claim to love me ? The boy understands—he feels abandoned, too. That’s what brought them together. And ultimately, when she leaves for college in less than three months, it's what will pull them apart.

The boy hates sports. Once, when he was 10, a basketball hit him square in the face, shattering his new glasses. He remembers the pain, the cuts under his eyebrows, the shard of refracted lens that nearly sliced his left cornea. Even in the emergency room, he heard the voice of the other boy, the voice that taunted, “I’m gonna rag on your ass” just before the ball was thrown. He does not play sports anymore.

And yet, he loves to watch the girl run track. Her events are the long jump, 110m hurdles, and shot put. When she throws the shot, his heart stutters. Her body coils, face locked in concentration. The skin on her legs changes color, darkening to reddish brown. She spins and uncoils, heaving the black metal with sudden force, releasing all her clenched energy. The 16-pound shot flies through the air like a cannonball. She's a goddess, the boy marvels, a champion, and she's got two state shot put records to prove it.

After the last home meet of the year, he waits in the stands for the teams to finish cooling down. The minutes tumble over each other. Finally she's ready, and he joins her on the quarter-mile track, which she always walks around afterward to keep her knees from locking up. They have not seen each other all day. He looks forward to this time--a chance to be alone with her and talk, like his parents do in the quiet of early evening.

The girl is still wearing her white team shirt and blue shorts. She adjusts her hair, letting it fall to one side out of a loose chignon. She tilts her head slightly--hands pushing the wave away from her neck, into a ponytail—and puts on a blue visor. She seems more tired than usual. In eighty-one days she is leaving for college in the southern part of the state. He supposes it could be worse--she could be going to France again. She swears she is not going to run track in college, that she will come back to visit on vacations. It's a state school with a bad reputation, as his parents have pointed out, far removed from the well-respected main campus.

"They barely have electricity, let alone a physics lab," his father scoffed when the boy mentioned the school's name once during dinner. His father expects him to study physics in college, to unlock the secrets of the universe the way he did when he was young. The arrogance of that expectation, the nerve! The boy can barely choke back his contempt. He will never be his father.

He feels a light touch near his shoulder. The girl's dark eyes glisten expectantly. "What's wrong?" she asks. The boy doesn't know how to respond. A sudden funk has descended upon him, like debris falling from the sky. He puts his hands in his pockets, then takes them out. Puts them in again...takes them out. She wears no make-up, and yet her face seems to shimmer in the late day sun, her cheeks sleek and contoured like shells just washed up on a beach. He notices the way the visor darkens her face, and shapes her hair into a single, perfect arc. The spring air is cooling. They have circled the track twice. He does not want this moment to end.

Eighty-one days, and counting. What he will do next year, when the girl is not here? He cannot remember a time when she was not part of his life, though they have known each other for only two years. Eighty-one days, and after tonight it will be eighty. Time is slipping away, each moment a slow drip that will eventually become a deluge.

The girl has to shower and get home for dinner. He wants to kiss her, but he can't. They are kindred, and yet there is always a space. They have gone to movies, walked all night through town forests and parking lots, talked for endless hours on the phone. He has asked her how she feels about him on more than one occasion, and she has explained patiently, kindly, the way you would to someone with a fatal disease, the reality of their situation.

"I don't know," she has admitted. "I don't think I feel the way you do." Friendship is what she wants, a true companion, intimacy without an intimate. The boy has read about girls, about their mysterious ways and inherent contradictions, and he wonders if this is an example. He has been warned by his mother to never pressure a girl, to never make her do anything she doesn't want. And so he stays close by, alert for any change in the girl's stance, but knowing, and perhaps even accepting, the futility of his desire.

He offers to drive her home but she declines. He watches her leave the track and disappear into the locker room. He stands alone in the fading light, the ache in his chest like something malignant, something a doctor could remove and crumble in his hands to dust.

Eighty-one days until the end of the world.

The girl collects college sweatshirts. Loyola, Penn, Stanford...she likes their bright colors, their thickness, their warmth. She likes wearing them after meets with nylon warmup pants or black jeans, but never her boots. Last Christmas she asked for two things: gold hoop earrings and leather boots. She got both, the boots sent via a department store in Chicago by her father. In a few short months they have become her most treasured possession. They extend to the top of her calves, just below her knees. She likes the way she looks in them, the way that, coupled with the earrings and a denim skirt and the blue angora sweater her mother gave her, she feels older than she is.

She puts on a black Georgetown sweatshirt and warmup pants in the locker room, after her shower, and carefully places the boots inside a zippered compartment in her equipment bag. She doesn't want her damp track clothes to stain them. Because of her long walk with the boy, the locker room is empty. A radio in the hall belonging to the janitor plays Latin music.

She thinks the boy, about his sullen and fidgety silence during their walk, and about her insomnia. Insomnia runs in her family, and lately hers has been getting worse. She knows it affected her performance today. She came in eighth overall, her times and distances barely half of her usual ones. Whatever enjoyment she once got out of these silly meets is now gone. She's not even sure why she's still on the team except that everyone expects her to be. The boy comes to every home meet and sits in the stands enraptured, as if she was waving a cape at a charging bull instead of doing what comes so naturally. She can feel his eyes on her.

She leaves school and starts the 15-minute walk home in the gathering dark, her hair pulled back with plastic clips. Normally the boy drives her, but today he seemed irritable and lost. Sometimes he makes her so mad. They parted awkwardly, a mumbled exchange of "see ya's" without a clarfication of when. Already she knows she will not be able to sleep tonight--her senses feel heightened, her muscles twitchy. Her mother has mentioned sleeping pills, but because of team regulations, she is not allowed to take them. Her mother knows this, too, and still she offers. Her mother takes too many pills.

She passes one-story houses with tidy front yards, her equipment bag slung over her shoulder. She thinks: How do you know when you’re in love? Do things smell different, look different? The boy insists he loves her. But how does he know? What if he's wrong? For the last two years he's been her closest friend. And yet because of his confession she honestly doesn't know how to feel about him.

In the yard of a fenced-in white ranch, a black dog trots in front of a hedge. Its brown stump of a tail flutters happily, and the girl feels a rush of kindness. Such a nice dog, she thinks, looking at its profile. She should have a dog to run with. She stops and leans on the wooden fence, her bag sliding off her shoulder.

"Hi, puppy!" she coos at the dog, smiling. The dog fixes its charcoal eyes on her. Ears like dollops of rolled dough shoot up. The dog seems uncertain whether she’s friend or foe. Then, in an instant, a decision is made. It charges the fence, a whirl of thundering barks and bared yellow teeth. She takes an involuntary step back, but the dog leaps through the air as if bouncing on a trampoline. Its upper body clears the fence’s serrated wooden top, and its jaws lock onto the side of her equipment bag.

The dog is strong--bigger than she thought--and its incisors tear through the bag's outer lining. The girl realizes she's made a terrible mistake. She tries to pull the bag away, but the dog won't let go. It paws at the fence and its oblong head rachets from side-to-side, as if the bag is prey to be torn apart.

Her hair falls in front of her face. Damnit, she thinks, frantically brushing it back, then sees with horror that one of her boots is sticking out of the bag’s side. "Get away!" The dog’s snout is already digging into the fragrant leather. She feels a trickle of panic. How could she think this dog was cute?

She pulls hard at the tattered bag. Her shampoo and hair brush and cleats fall out. She's about to scream when a high-pitched voice calls, "Cupcake!" The dog releases its grip. It squirms from between fence posts and runs for the house. The girl gasps in relief. A man she can't see clearly in the twilight gestures to her from the front steps. "Soup," he calls out in an almost sing-song manner. “You want to get soup?"

The girl collects her things and hurries down the street, breathing hard. She pushes her hair out of her face and smells a pungent, wet dog odor. It’s not until she gets home, in the safety of her room, that she examines her boots for damage. And sees that one of them is missing.

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